Staging female creatives in French Caribbean women’s theatre

This chapter addresses the experiences of black female creatives as depicted in plays by Caribbean women writers: Maryse Condé’s Pension les alizés (1988), and Gerty Dambury’s Trames (2008) and Des doutes et des errances (2014). The plays analyzed here depict female characters as artists, writers or even performers, who attempt to reconcile everyday life, relationships and their creative work. Condé and Dambury stage the obstacles relating to race and gender discrimination their characters face, but also how these women transcend stereotypes and strive for a new form of creative expression. The analysis demonstrates how, for the black female creatives in the plays studied, the issue of authority is twofold. On the one hand, they confront institutional and societal authorities that confine them to rigid gendered and racial categories. On the other, the black female artist in these plays also transcends those restrictive categories to impose her own artistic authority.